In his latest television ad, 2nd Congressional District Republican Rep. John Kline uses a familiar Minnesota landmark to emphasize how dire the nation’s debt problems are.

With the Metrodome as his backdrop, Kline said, “America’s national debt is $16 trillion. It’s the equivalent of selling every seat in the Metrodome, every single day, for 9,000 years. This debt is weakening America. To cut spending, I led the successful fight to ban wasteful earmarks.”

Kline’s numbers are right, but his ad deserves some context.

The Evidence

This week, the nation’s total debt is about $16 trillion. That includes intergovernmental debt, such as the Medicare and Social Security trust funds. Debt held by the public, meaning federal debt held by individuals, corporations and governments, is about $11.3 trillion.

The Kline camp assumes that Vikings tickets cost an average of $76, which is a reasonable assumption given tickets for games this season currently costs somewhere between $15 and $143 each. The stadium can seat 64,111 people.

Assuming the stadium is full every day, all year, at $76 a pop, Kline is right that it would take about 9,000 years to reach $16 trillion.

For several years, Kline has eschewed earmarks, the practice of requesting money for pet projects at home in annual appropriations bills, but he wasn’t always such a purist.

In 2004, the Star Tribune reported that Kline received $3 million for projects in his district in a highway funding bill.

In 2008, Kline was among 20 House and Senate lawmakers who dumped the practice, along with Republican Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, who has long crusaded against earmarks as the hallmark of wasteful spending.

“There’s a growing awareness that the system is broken and we aren’t going to fix it unless some of us start taking a stand,” Kline told the Associated Press in 2008.

Earmarking is currently banned in the U.S. House. But that hasn’t stopped lawmakers from finding other ways to send cash home to their districts. And budget experts say that earmarks are such a tiny sliver of the federal budget that banning them does little to ameliorate the nation’s debt woes.

The Verdict

Kline accurately uses the Metrodome to describe the size of the nation’s debt.

And while PoliGraph questions Kline’s characterization of how effective banning earmarks is in lowering spending, he largely gets it right in this ad.

About the blogger

Catharine Richert covers politics for MPR News, and writes PoliGraph, a fact-checking feature that gets behind the spin in Minnesota politics. She has also contributed to MPR’s coverage of the federal health care overhaul. Catharine joined the MPR newsroom in 2011 after finishing a master’s degree at the U of M’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs. Previously, Catharine worked for PolitiFact.com and Congressional Quarterly. She lives in St. Paul with her husband and son.

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They don’t need a constitutional amendment to “make” them pass a balanced budget. They just need to have the political will.

Spending bills originate in the House. Kline and his Republican colleagues proposed and passed a budget that added to the national debt. Now they are running as champions of a balanced budget.

Which makes this advertisement “pants on fire” material if you look at the substance and ignore the glitter. But that would spoil the media’s narrative.

Ross Williams

There is another problem with this fact-check. Kline specifically includes intra-governmental debt in his Metrodome example. But the constitutional amendment he proposes as a solution would not prevent borrowing from social security or other intra-governmental debt. That makes it factually innaccurate for the purpose it was used.

Of course that is far too complex for an entertaining fact-checking article.

Ralph Crammedin

Sorry, Catharine, your assessment fails.

The problem is that you treat Kline’s ad as a series of unrelated propositions, and attempt to assess the validity of those propositions. But that’s not what it is. It’s an argument, and assessment of an argument is not just whether its premises can stand, but more importantly whether its conclusion follows from those premises.

Kline offers the following argument:

Premise:

The debt is large and therefore damaging.

Premise (implied):

Cutting spending reduces the debt and lessens the damage.

Conclusion (also implied, in part):

Because Kline “led a successful fight to ban wasteful earmarks,” spending was cut, the debt was reduced, and the damage was mitigated.

Kline’s argument is fallacious and intentionally misleading. This is because, as you point out, cuts to earmarks are trivial in the face of the size of the debt, and do little to reduce it. Therefore, regardless of the validity of Kline’s imaginative method of describing the size of the debt, his conclusion is false and his argument fails.

If the PoliGraph feature is to be respected, you must assess the whole of your subject matter, not cherry-pick trivial and irrelevant details. Checking Kline’s Metrodome arithmetic, and granting his argument a passing grade on that basis, offers no value to the reader, but simply makes your “analysis” a laughingstock.

Jamie

Thank you, Ross and Ralph! These were my thoughts exactly, and I would never have been able to state them as well as you both did. These are often problems with Richert’s fact-checking as well as with many other fact-checkers.

http://www.mnpoliticalroundtable.com Minnesota Central

I agree with Ralph that the math of how many seats/years is irrelevant … actually trivial.

Chairman Kline fails to acknowledge that the Republicans have redefined “earmarks” by calling them “programatic requests … and finding other loopholes like MTB (Misc. Tariff Bills) which benefit only certain companies. Heck, Chairman Kline voted for the Stillwater Bridge legislation that was created via an earmark.

Instead, I wish the question would be : Is Chairman Kline’s Constitutional Amendment just a faux campaign issue ?

Let us remember that the House considered the amendment this session and Paul Ryan, amongst others voted against it … it failed to pass. Even if it did pass, it would have to be approved by the Senate … and then by 3/4ths of the State Legislatures …. is this really the top issue that voters want a candidate to be addressing ?

That aside, considering that Minnesota and virtually all other states have a requirement for a balanced budget, we are only too familiar with the accounting games that are played to make the budget balance.